After the end of the Bernie Sanders campaign, we have no shortage of takes on why Bernie lost. Pointing fingers in directions that confirm their preexisting political convictions, analysts claim the working class rejected socialism, or nonvoters will never vote, or that Bernie should have pivoted from insurgency to a party unity message to win over Democrats, or that the campaign should have pushed harder against Biden. Many of these arguments are worth engaging with. But as explanations of why the campaign didn’t come out on top, those takeaways don’t fit with what I observed in my ten months of on-the-ground organizing for the Sanders campaign in Iowa and Illinois.

The Bernie campaign was about organizing. We aimed to organize a multiracial, working-class coalition of people behind a presidential campaign that represented their values, not the interests of the rich. Over and over again in Iowa, I saw people transformed by conversations about Sanders and his platform, communities rally around the possibility of change, and new supporters take their first steps into political organizing.

We preached that our campaign would build a new working-class movement in this country, a tall order even for a country with a more established and functional Left than the United States. Our problem was not that we set this as a goal for ourselves — it was that our applied strategy stopped short of even attempting to reach this goal.